As the period for public comments regarding the regulatory framework for bitcoin comes to an end, a debate heats up among members of the Indian Parliament about the legalization of digital currencies. Meanwhile, bitcoin trading volumes remain strong in the country.Parliament Members Divided Over Bitcoin

India's Government Divided Over Bitcoin LegalizationAt a Parliamentary Standing Committee of Finance meeting last week, a heated discussion erupted among members of the Indian Parliament about bitcoin.

A number of Parliament members, including BJP member Kirit Somaiya, “cautioned the finance ministry officials present at the meeting against any move to legalise bitcoin,” according to The Economics Times, India’s leading business newspaper.

A source told the publication:

Members feared that it [bitcoin] could become a parallel instrument for cycling black money and dodgy transactions and also be a source of terror financing.India's Government Divided Over Bitcoin LegalizationKirit SomaiyaThey wanted the government to look into the vulnerability of bitcoin. Somaiya who has repeatedly spoken against the digital currency, calling it “illegal” on numerous occasions, raised a series of questions.

He asked the officials why the government was being ambivalent about this instrument, citing that they have not clarified whether it was a legally permissible instrument or not.

He also demanded to know whether officials are properly briefing the prime minister about the risks of bitcoin.

Bitcoin Could Soon Be Regulated in India

Currently, the same government has been considering legalizing the digital currency. Last week, the Finance Ministry started soliciting comments from the public on how to best regulate bitcoin. The deadline for submissions is May 31, and 3,357 comments have been submitted at press time. The majority of them are in support of regulating bitcoin.

India's Government Divided Over Bitcoin Legalization“Regulating bitcoins will address many such concerns and queries, including market acceptance, customer trust, investment security, money laundering, hawala, etc,” Hesham Rehman, co-founder and CEO of Bitxoxo Bitcoins Online, was quoted by The Times Group as saying. “For instance, regulations like strong eKYC and penalizing bitcoin trading in cash will help proper transaction records which will negate all the chances of any sort of illegal activity.”

Karthik Iyer, India’s Ambassador of the blockchain think tank P2P Foundations, also offered his viewpoint on the situation:

The government should think about treating cryptocurrencies as a commodity if not a full-fledged currency with exchange value. There is a lot of arbitrage in the markets and it can generate a great deal of wealth for India’s crypto traders.India’s Bitcoin Volume

India's Government Divided Over Bitcoin LegalizationMeanwhile, bitcoin trading volumes in India have exploded. Last week, the price of a bitcoin skyrocketed globally. During that spike, it traded at nearly a $1,000 premium in India as supplies to the country have been limited.

This month, leading Indian bitcoin broker Zebpay announced that it had reached a milestone of over 500,000 app downloads and is adding more than 2,500 users daily. Struggling to keep up with the surge in new users and volume, Zebpay announced, “we have put a temporary buy limit of Rs 50,000 per day due to the shortage of bitcoin stock.”

India's Government Divided Over Bitcoin LegalizationNew user growth was also the cause of the downtime experienced at leading Indian bitcoin exchange by volume, Coinsecure. “We have been experiencing exponential growth of users on our website, causing slowness and stress on our systems,” according to a statement from CEO Mohit Kalra to Coinsecure’s customers.

"Your bitcoin is secured in a way that is physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter a majority of miners, no matter what." -- gmaxwell

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Members feared that it [bitcoin] could become a parallel instrument for cycling black money and dodgy transactions and also be a source of terror financing.

Their fears are grounded. Personally i like bitcoin and altcoin idea, but decentralized feature have dark side, which can be used for terrorism and black money cycling.

How can you tell that Bitcoin decentralisation is problem for the declare Bitcoin as legal because before the Bitcoin people were using the normal money fiat for the illegal purpose .So Bitcoin can't be a reason for the black money cycling , but opposite of this Bitcoin is a better way to rove the black money holder in the world . Because every transaction are open and if we can restrict a person to use a eKYC verified account for the storage of Bitcoin then no one can make illegal activities with the Bitcoin and probably most of the chances are to caught the black money holder .So here I think this would be a big reason that the government of India declare the Bitcoin legal way of payment and nothing is illegal to use it for the payment purpose .

Some fears on Bitcoin can be unfounded. I have no problem with putting up regulations for Bitcoin compared to totally banning the said currency because if they ban it there is no guarantee that transactions will not take place anymore and they can not trace all the transactions especially done online.

Yes, Bitcoin can be utilized by terrorist but this is the same thing with fiat money. Do we have to ban fiat money because there are terrorist and illegal people using the fiat?

Some fears on Bitcoin can be unfounded. I have no problem with putting up regulations for Bitcoin compared to totally banning the said currency because if they ban it there is no guarantee that transactions will not take place anymore and they can not trace all the transactions especially done online.

Yes, Bitcoin can be utilized by terrorist but this is the same thing with fiat money. Do we have to ban fiat money because there are terrorist and illegal people using the fiat?

Exactly. Just what I thought is putting a tighter regulations around bitcoin and its Indian exchangers, let them comply with the Indian Central bank law regarding KYC and AML. As I have said, bitcoin is already a global phenomena and its hard to completely shut it down by any nation. Regulations could be the solution. And as far as illegal activities, bitcoin has nothing to do with it, criminals will always found a exploit and will used it to their advantage similar to what fiat is. Some terrorists used NGO's and other trust funds as front to get and transfer money from their organizations.

Shall we ban knifes for the fact that you can kill people with them?shall we ban cooking gas because you can blow up a house with it?everything that is a tool can be used for good and bad.Dollars never stopped terrorist from using them.no matter what regulation.

Shall we ban knifes for the fact that you can kill people with them?shall we ban cooking gas because you can blow up a house with it?everything that is a tool can be used for good and bad.Dollars never stopped terrorist from using them.no matter what regulation.

Bitcoin in their eyes is worse than everything you mentioned. It's the fact that people basically don't need any governmental supervision anymore. But also the fact that it offers people the option to store money outside the banking system, plus that it allows people to easily move value from their country to another -- and there is nothing that they can do about it. It basically comes all down to that, but they just point to the potential illegal use cases that makes them not like Bitcoin. Liars.

Biggest problem for India is the current high fees as the current fees out price bitcoin for the general public in India, and reserve it for the well off only, the poor people in India will have no chance to acquire bitcoin thanks to its high fees, but I doubt Parliament take the poor into account, so when we see this talk about India, as bitcoin currently is, it can only affect the top 10% of india at very best. This is not what was intended when btc was created as it should not discriminate and should be available for all classes of people to use, rich or poor.

Biggest problem for India is the current high fees as the current fees out price bitcoin for the general public in India, and reserve it for the well off only, the poor people in India will have no chance to acquire bitcoin thanks to its high fees, but I doubt Parliament take the poor into account, so when we see this talk about India, as bitcoin currently is, it can only affect the top 10% of india at very best. This is not what was intended when btc was created as it should not discriminate and should be available for all classes of people to use, rich or poor.

This is a very interesting thought. I now watch bitcoin and understand that more and more rich people are buying it. They already have opportunities to get rich. I think this is not very fair. India is not a very rich country, so I hound very much if there will be development of bitcoin